On Tuesday night after work I found myself as tired as an OMC after a deep run in an afternoon senior's tourney, and I fell asleep at 7PM. At midnight I sat bolt upright in bed, and I knew then that I was up and awake for the day.

Rather than toss and turn in bed, or play video games and surf the web until I had to leave for my temporary gig at the office, I hit the shower, freshened up, and I struck out for a wee hour slot run at the MGM.

When I hit the casino floor at 2:30AM, I spotted an Asian grinder already doing his rounds; they're represented there 24/7; as I've mentioned, but this guy looked new to me. The newer Asian grinders often shy away from some of the more complicated +EV slot titles, and this turned out to be the case, as I found a few good plays and had a moderate amount of luck.

Around 6AM, as I was finishing up, a White slot grinder showed up, and I felt sorry for him, as by then the Asian grinder and I had cleaned out every last Sklansky dime of EV from the floor, and one could count the number of normie slot players on one hand at that hour, and they're the ones who build the machines back up, so it would likely be several more hours before things turned profitable again. The White grinder would be better off driving the hour and 30 minutes to Mohegan Sun or Encore, assuming that those joints hadn't already been cleaned out by the time he got there.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 0 hours

MGM Springfield Slots: 3.5 hours
+$169.07

Running Poker Total: 482 hours, +$8775.00

Running Slot Total: 197.5 hours, +$5517.55

Grand Total: 679.5 hours, +$14292.55

Were you not in the mood for the pokies? Based on the little I saw, the game might be good at the MGM in the wee hours...
Word on the street is also, not that I would know that, in the US you can get some decent sleeping pills for like nothing and obv with no prescription or anything at the f*ing walmart or wherever. You prolly know that though. They are kind of habit forming though anyways, so you have to be careful. But better than insomnia IMO. Or the weed shop obv...

The poker room closes at 3am, so I wouldn't have had time to do much more than sign in, unrack and rerack.

Plus they don't run the promos at those hours, but they still rake the promo dollars, so when I play non-promo, I can almost hear the hiss as the Sklansky bucks leak out of me.

My insomnia will likely clear up after today, when I no longer have to be up at a specific time.

what sort of vampire are you identifying as these days?

80s vampire.

shame no mention of bram stoker
he was your mother's vampire

I'll be stealing this.

Thanks Phat Mack!

As far as being a vampire goes, I'll say that I'm a working vampire. The older creatures of the night probably don't have to work any more, having invested in real estate along with blue chip stocks and annuities, and then just having been patient over several decades or centuries.

Me: I've let my finances slip down over the past few months by engaging in my old nemesis: inactivity. So, for this month, I'll need to keep my mind on the grind if I want to keep my ass off the streets.

My friends in Norwich invited me to come down on Saturday, so I combined business and pleasure by capping off my visit with an epic wee hour slot run at the Mohegan Sun.

Every time I visit Mohegan, I find more playable machines. The management has not been adding any beatable titles; instead, both of their casino areas are purposefully designed with confusing circular floor layouts, and while I'm checking things there, I have a hard time keeping track of where I haven't looked.

On this visit, I found a shitton of Ultimate X Video Poker machines. This title can be lucrative, but it's also very time-consuming to check: seven hours worth of time, in total, in this case. Some of the newer machines each have more than 100 screens to call up and look through. These are not your great-aunt's old pokey machines.

Mohegan has a few $5 five-play Ultimate X options. That adds up to $125 per spin (for the grinder, $250 per spin for the normie, for reasons that would be tedious for me to explain).

I did not find any plays at that $5 denomination, but I did hit a few four-of-a-kinds with multipliers on the smaller denominations, and those hits made for a very good morning.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 0 hours

MGM Springfield Slots: 3.5 hours
+$94.15

Mohegan Sun Slots: 7 hours
+$866.95

Running Poker Total: 482 hours, +$8775.00

Running Slot Total: 208 hours, +$6478.65

Grand Total: 690 hours, +$15253.65

15k baby!

thanks for an Amazing thread. It seems like your results are better at slots than Poker. Do you think this is variance or that slots are more +EV for you?

which do you enjoy more?

Thanks for the kind words, sickhuman!

I like the slots, when they're +EV, but I'm almost certain that live poker will be lasting a lot longer than slots as a potential source of income. I remember the first generation of advantage play slots, and that lasted from roughly 1999 to 2005.

I don't know when this second generation of AP slots started; I just stumbled across it a few months ago, but it was in full effect when I found it. Did it start in 2021, or 2019, or 2017? I don't know. In any case, there will be an end point to it. The number of AP machines on the floor seems to be holding steady, but the number of slot grinders grows every day. In the previous generation, dwindling resources led to disputes and fisticuffs between grinders, and also normies being harassed, and that killed everything. I believe that the same will happen again in this generation.

Speaking of normies being harassed: I was involved in an incident last month that I'd sort of forgotten about, out of embarrassment...but here it is. I was walking through a slot run and I spotted a juicy play on a Rich Little Piggies machine from around 20 meters away. I quickly sidled up to the machine, sat down, and reached into my wallet, but a lady almost immediately got in my face.

She had been playing that machine, and she had gotten up for 5 seconds to talk to her friend, who was playing on the same bank a few feet away, and the lady had plenty of credits still in the machine that I was about to put my money into. I hadn't spotted that in my rush to jump on the play.

I apologized profusely and left. If that lady had decided to talk to security, the eye in the sky footage would have backed her up, and she could have had me booted and banned, and maybe rightly so, at least from the casino's perspective.

^Seems like an honest mistake. Don’t think they’d ban you for it but might of possibly taken a note down on your record, perhaps a first “strike”.

also thought that read like an honest mistake.

Thanks guys.

It was an honest mistake, but it was also sloppy and avoidable and unprofessional in that it bothered one of the casino's bread-and-butter normal slot players.

While I'm grinding the slots, I should be using the equivalent of the Star Trek Prime Directive when dealing with the normies: I.e. don't disturb them in any way.

Mind on the Grind, Grind on the Mind

Today I put in 4 hours on the slots and 6 hours in the poker room. I started the day -$75 on my first slot play. I put my head down and walked the floor, looking for more plays.

I then sat down at the poker table and lost $200 in the first 2 hours without getting into any real spots; I just missed everything, I couldn't find good bluffing spots, and I lost small pots left and right.

But I was playing fine, and the table was good. I remembered the Brad Owen video below that I'd recently watched, where Brad finds himself down quite a bit early in his session, and at around the 13:20 mark he says,

"It's another pot that goes the wrong way. We've been seeing a lot of those. I add on for $400 more. I'm in for $3500, and I'm down $2000 total. It's hard to feel optimistic, but I'm playing okay. I just need to make some decent hands, and I might be able to recover."

That seems like simple, standard stuff, but it's not. Not when you're trapped there in the moment, stuck real money, and nothing seems to be going your way. Notice that his parameters are hopeful but realistic. It's not I have to make some decent hands and recover this money, or the session will be a disaster.

It's Yes, it's hard to be chipper, but If I make some decent hands, I might be able to recover. No promises—let's just keep trying to play well and see what happens. And if I don't get it back, there's another session around the corner.



TL;DR My luck turned around and I booked green.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6 hours
+$200.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 4 hours
+$128.22

Running Poker Total: 488 hours, +$8985.00

Running Slot Total: 212 hours, +$6606.87

Grand Total: 700 hours, +$15591.87

Kitties!

Hi guys. Sorry for the lack. I was sick with the flu, non-Covid as far as the test showed. Today's the first day in a while that I don't feel contagious, and it's football promo season at the local cardroom!

More later.

Go get some promo $!

#Promos4Life

I've put in a few sessions since my last update. Notable in this time period was my first extended downswing on the slots. While I don't believe slots to be as high variance as poker, I really haven't played enough hours to be the judge of that. One of the perversities of variance is that it can disguise itself as a lack of variance in the short term.

My main loss leader lately has been Wheel of Fortune High Roller (henceforth WOFHR), and that's likely because I haven't been able to uncover free professional advice on exactly when that game becomes +EV. I've been using similar reel-building games like Hexbr3aker 3 and Buffalo Ascension as guidelines for WOFHR, but that may be the completely wrong approach. In any case, the other slot grinders always circle and hover around the WOFHR bank like it's the Black Mecca Stone of one-armed bandits, so it's definitely +EV, if approached correctly.

So there's a pay website called Machine Pro Club that appears to have the information I need to beat WOFHR, along with a bunch of other games. I've done some cursory due diligence on the site and it appears to be legit. A subscription is $49/month, with the claim that I can cancel at any time.

I will likely try one month and hope that I don't get scammed. Given the high denominations per spin on WOFHR and some of the other games, $50 would be a drop in the bucket EV-wise.

On the poker front, I certainly haven't been card dead. In the last 12 hours, I've been dealt aces 4 times—once back-to-back—along with a similarly high allotment of kings, queens, jacks and ace-king.

Unfortunately, the premium hands haven't been holding up postflop, and I would have been stuck for half a buyin if it weren't for...the promos! I hit a football promo for $150, and then I hit a high hand for $1000, so I have that going for me, which is nice.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 12 hours
+$889.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 12 hours
(-$414.24)

Running Poker Total: 500 hours, +$9874.00

Running Slot Total: 224 hours, +$6192.63

Grand Total: 724 hours, +$16066.63

A Note About Jann Wenner from Rolling Stone

Before I get into the album review below, I'll address the news about Jann Wenner, co-founder of Rolling Stone Magazine and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Wenner will soon be publishing a book called The Masters, in which he will post his lengthy interviews with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, Jerry Garcia, Bono, and Bruce Springsteen.

Someone noticed fairly quickly that these rock icons were all White guys. All of his subjects in his book, living and dead, are (or were) good friends with Wenner. When asked why he chose this lineup, Wenner could have just said something along the lines of, "They're my friends. It's my prerogative if I want to write about my buddies," and left it at that, and he likely would have minimized the potential backlash.

He did say something like that, but he also told the New York Times that Black musicians and female musicians were not as articulate on an intellectual level as their White male counterparts, therefore Black folks and women did not pique his interest as an interviewer.

It's in there. I read it. I'm not going to add much to it, because it's beyond the scope of these reviews.

Where it runs into the scope of my reviews is the question of whether I should now trust Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums list, knowing what I now know about the odious opinions of its co-founder and leading light, Jann Wenner.

I'm going to trust the list, for now, but only because Wenner sold Rolling Stone to Penske Media in 2017, and this version of the Top 500 list came out in 2020, so I'm going to move forward on the assumption that Wenner had nothing to do with choosing this list. If I find out that that's not the case, I'll take another look at it.


Rolling Stone's 484th Greatest Album of All Time: Born This Way by Lady Gaga (2011)

One of the reasons why I started this project was to help fill in a 15 year gap in my musical knowledge, ranging from around 2005 to 2020, the year this Top 500 list came out.

In 2005 I hit my mid-30's, and I don't think that I'm the only person whose keenness for new music started to fade once I reached that age. While my interest waned, I fooled myself into thinking that it was the music that was getting worse, when there was still plenty of great new music that was simply passing me by, and it was now in the purview of new generations.

So I missed Lady Gaga.

But I couldn't completely miss her, because she was and is a huge entertainment juggernaut: almost 200 million albums sold, as well as several world record online sales figures, more than a dozen Grammys, along with two Golden Globes, a plethora of MTV awards, recognition from several Halls of Fame, all sorts of person of the year and woman of the year and most influential person awards.

I'll bet she'd give a good interview, Jann, hahaha.

Born This Way was Gaga's second album, and a huge hit. I recognized two of the three hit singles: Born This Way and Edge of Glory. Yoü and I was the third big single, but I hadn't heard it before, which is strange because back then my blasted work radio played the hits and only the hits, forever and ever.

Yoü and I might be my favorite track, although it's not terribly representative of the rest of the album.



In it Gaga shows that she can do modern country better than the average modern country act, while still mildly taking the piss out of the genre with Dadaist lyrics like "Muscle cars drove a truck right through my heart."

For the rest of the album, Lady Gaga projects a wry, knowing sensuality that sounds to me like it's coming from a woman in her 40's or 50's. She was 25 when she put out Born This Way.

Government Hooker is deeply weird and I liked it, until the part towards the end of the song, when the censorship bleeps started kicking in.



Now, the censoring could be in place for the benefit of the YouTube monetization algorithm, and not actually on the original album, but I kind of doubt that. I found an "explicit" version of the song on YouTube, but curiously, that version still had the bleeps.

This bothered me a lot, and I still don't fully understand why it did, even after I've had some time to reflect on it. After all, I make these posts in a forum that censors the f-word along with other swears and slurs, and it doesn't bother me much—although I do enjoy shitting up the filter in places where I find a gap in its scrutiny.

The censoring on the album; I would guess, was set in place purely with sales in mind. Born This Way came out in 2011, back when Walmart and Costco and Target and Sam's Club and other explicit lyrics-averse chain box stores were still enormous drivers of music industry profits.

So what, right? It was a savvy business decision. Why should I begrudge a woman trying to put some more bread on her table?



In this case, I seem unable to fully articulate my disappointment on an intellectual level. So no interview for me, Jann.

Look: if you know in advance that your swear words are going to be bleeped, how about trying to write lyrics that have a similar impact but in which there are no swears to annoyingly bleep?

This opinion makes me a hypocrite, of course; I've written plenty of asterisked words in this blog. But now that I've bitched about it (I thought that would be bleeped, and was going to do a whole riff on it), I'm going to challenge myself: no more censored words in this blog. I will find better ones. Let's see how long I last.

Lady Gaga is obviously a genius: songwriter, musician, dancer, actor, activist, the whole entertainment package. But I was distracted while listening to the album, and I can't give it the accolades that it deserves. My baby mind flew away and my cynicism sidled in. Gaga should show up on this list again, and I hope to do her better justice when she does.

Rolling Stone Says

“Over-the-top” isn’t an insult in Gaga’s world; it’s a statement of purpose. Her second album is a work of blessed bombast, all arena-size sonics and Springsteenian romanticism, complete with a Clarence Clemons sax solo.

Over-the-top but rated PG13.
Okay, I'll stop.

I have a friend from another gambling related forum. She does some advantage slot stuff. She’s smart as a whip, I’d imagine +EV in her slot grind but does it more as a hobby, maybe slight side hustle to cover some of her costs for her many trips to Vegas.

We met for a drink when I was in Vegas at the lovely Double Down Saloon. Afterwards she gave me a ride to the luxurious Silver Sevens where I was grinding a table games matchplay coupon and BJ pays 2 to 1 coupon. I followed her as she did her slot circuit and she immediately found a play on a WOFHR. She explained her justification for the play but I never play slots and am clueless. All I know was she put in a hundo, did like three spins, hit something and a minute later was cashing out like $250. She said it’s normally not that easy. She then saw another play on Buffaloes where she was down I think for around $300 before hitting and cashing out around even.

Long story but I’ll message her and see if she’s interested in trading notes. BTW she also mentioned the dead eye slot grinders guys you’ve discussed in the past. A while back she was scoping out some slots at I think Excalibur and a guy came over and said, “me and my guys got this one and to move on”.